Part I. p. 49.
It is enough, it seems, that all the disorderly classes of mankind, prompted as they are by their worst passions to trample on the public welfare, should know that they are, what every one else is convinced they are, the pests of society, and the evil is remedied. They are not to be exhorted to honesty, sobriety, or the observance of any laws, human or divine—they must not even be entreated to do their best. "Just as absurd would it be," we are told, "in a physician to send away his patient, when labouring under some desperate disease, with a recommendation to do his utmost towards his own cure, and then to come to him to finish it, as it is in the minister of the Gospel to propose to the sinner to do his best, by way of healing the disease of the soul—and then to come to the Lord Jesus to perfect his recovery. The only previous qualification is to know our misery, and the remedy is prepared." See Dr. Hawker's Works, vol. vi. p. 117.
For "know," let the Barrister substitute "feel;" that is, we know it as we know our life; and then ask himself whether the production of such a state of mind in a sinner would or would not be of greater promise as to his reformation than the repetition of the Ten Commandments with paraphrases on the same.—But why not both? The Barrister is at least as wrong in the undervaluing of the one as the pseudo-Evangelists in the exclusion of the other.
Ib. p. 51.
Whatever these new Evangelists may teach to the contrary, the present state of public morals and of public happiness would assume a very different appearance if the thieves, swindlers, and highway robbers, would do their best towards maintaining themselves by honest labour, instead of perpetually planning new systems of fraud, and new schemes of depredation.
That is, if these thieves had a different will—not a mere wish, however anxious:—for this wish "the libertine" doubtless has, as described in p. 50,—but an effective will. Well, and who doubts this? The point in dispute is, as to the means of producing this reformation in the will; which, whatever the Barrister may think, Christ at least thought so difficult as to speak of it, not once or twice, but uniformly, as little less than miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation. This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol
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